A doll depicting Vice President JD Vance is on display at the "Barbie Pond on Avenue Q," on Q Street, NW, on Monday, July 28, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
drholden3: why do you think the Democrats have not mounted some kind of coordinated attack centered on Steven Miller and Russell Vought as the "Rasputins" of the Trump government. Especially Miller.
Emphasizing Miller and Vought as pulling most of the strings and Trump as a weak, pliable figurehead seems a no-brainer, but.........crickets.
“Coordinated attack” probably isn’t how I’d conceive of it, if only because “coordinated” strategies tend to come off as strained and artificial. Maybe more like viral partisan messaging. I would love to see high-profile Dems make a point of slotting video footage of those two spitting unhinged incitement into whatever presentations they happen to be giving. These are ugly men, inside and out, better foils for the Democratic Party than Trump alone.
The answer to your question, why haven’t they done this, is hard to answer, but I think it’s worth noting that they haven’t done this kind of thing at all since the late aughts and early 2010s when they did a pretty good job portraying the Koch brothers as the men behind the curtain. In that time, Republicans transformed so many random liberals, progressives, and Democrats into bogeyman, I couldn’t possibly name them all. Big fish like George Soros and Hunter Biden, smaller ones like Lois Lerner, Sidney Blumenthal, Peter Strzok, and many more in between.
Over the past decade or so, Democrats have experienced both a quant takeover and a crisis of confidence in their ability to politic, and so I imagine this kind of lizard-brained approach just doesn’t occur to the decision-makers very often.
John: So it's clear -- from J.D. Vance's [recent] interview -- that the GOP intends, as part of their Epstein defense -- to argue that Biden's failure to publish the 'Epstein Files' (whatever that is) during his term means that either 1) Democrats authored the cover up or 2) it must not be that big of a deal, since surely he would have used it. In other words, if this was so important, why didn't Biden do it. And without giving in to conspiracy thinking, I have to admit: fair question. So I ask it of you: Why didn't Joe Biden get any records of Epstein related misdeeds (such as Donald Trump's) out there in public?
Happy to answer this, because I called on Biden to release the Epstein files in this here newsletter well before the election. I wrote that piece knowing he almost certainly would not do so. But I didn’t leap to the conclusion that the files must therefore exculpate Trump. Here’s why that is, and what I think Democrats can say now, as Republicans pretend Biden’s inaction makes them complicit in Trump’s coverup, or else exonerates Trump by implication. ...
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